The Red Door (11 page)

When the parade was over, I ran into the barrack room with the others. There was no one in the room except Lecky who was lying on his bed. I went over to him, thinking he was ill. He had shot
himself by putting the rifle in his mouth and pulling the trigger. The green coverlet on the bed was completely red and blood was dripping on to the scrubbed wooden floor. I ran outside and was
violently sick. Looking back now I think it was the training that did it. I didn’t want to be sick on that clean floor.

Of course, there was an inquiry but nothing came of it. No one wrote to his MP or to the press after all, not even the public schoolboys. There was even a certain sympathy for the corporal:
after all, he had his career to make and there were many worse than him. The two public schoolboys became officers: one in the Infantry and the other in education. I never saw them again. Perhaps
the corporal is a sergeant major now. Anyway, it was a long time ago but it was the first death I had ever seen.

The sheriff leaned down and spoke briefly to the two youths after they had been found guilty. He adjusted his hearing aid slightly though he had nothing to listen for. He
said,

‘If I may express a personal opinion I should like to say that I think the jury were right in finding you guilty. There are too many of you people around these days, who think you can
break the law with impunity and who believe in a cult of violence. In sentencing you I should like to add something which I have often thought and I hope that people in high places will listen. In
my opinion, this country made a great mistake when it abolished National Service. If it were in existence at this date perhaps you would not be here now. You would have been disciplined and taught
to be clean and tidy. You would have had to cut your hair and to walk properly instead of slouching about insolently as you do. You would not have been allowed to be idle and drunk. I am glad to be
able to give you the maximum sentence I can. I see no reason to be lenient.’

The two of them looked at him with insolence still. I was quite happy to see the sheriff giving them a stiff sentence. After all, the victim must be protected too: there is too much of this
molly-coddling. I hate court work: I would far rather be in my little office working on land settlements or discussing the finer points of wills.

It was a fine summer’s day as I left the court. There was no shadow anywhere, all fresh and new, just as I like to see this town.

She had left the Highlands many years before and was now living in a council flat (in a butterscotch-coloured block) in the Lowlands. Originally, when she had first moved, she
had come to a tenement in the noisy warm centre of the town, not much better than a slum in fact, but the tenement had been pulled down in a general drive to modernise the whole area. The council
scheme was itself supposed to be very modern with its nice bright colour, its little handkerchiefs of lawns, its wide windows. The block swarmed with children of all shapes and sizes, all ages and
colours of clothes. There were prams in practically all the hallways, and men in dungarees streamed home at five. Then they would all watch TV (she could see the blue light behind the curtains like
the sky of a strange planet), drink beer, or shake the flimsy walls with music from their radiograms. On Saturdays they would go to the football matches – the team was a Second Division one
– or they would mow the lawn in their shirtsleeves. The gardens were well kept on the whole, with roses growing here and there; in general, though, it was easier to lay down grass, and one
would see, lying on the grass, an occasional abandoned tricycle.

The walls of the council houses were scribbled over by the children who ran in and out of the closes playing and shouting and quarrelling. Apart from the graffiti, the council houses would have
been all right, she thought, but the children wouldn’t leave anything alone, and they were never looked after by their mothers who stood talking endlessly at bus stops, bought sweets for the
family when they ought to buy sustaining food, and went about with scarves on their heads.

She herself was seventy years old. She didn’t go out much now. For one thing, there was the stair which was steep and narrow and not meant for an old person at all. For another, there
weren’t many places she could go to. Of course, for a young person there were plenty of places, the cinema, the dance-hall, the skating rink and so on. But not for her. She did sometimes
attend the church though she disapproved of it: the minister was a bit too radical, leaving too many things in the hands of women, and there was too much of this catering for young people with
societies and groups. That wasn’t the job of the church. In any case, it should be left in the hands of the men.

She didn’t go to church very often in the winter. The fact was that it would be lonely coming home at night up that road with all these hooligans about. They would stab you as soon as look
at you. You could see them hanging about at windows waiting to burgle the shops: a lot of that went on. She herself often put a chain on the door and wouldn’t open it till she found out who
was behind it. Not that very many people called except the rent man, the insurance man (she was paying an insurance of two shillings a week, which would bury her when she passed on), the milkman,
and, occasionally, the postman. She would get an airmail letter now and again from her sister in Canada telling her all about her daughters who were being married off one after the other. There
were six, including Marian the eldest. Her sister would send her photographs of the weddings showing coarse-looking, winking Americans sitting around a table with a white cloth and loaded with
drinks of all kinds, the bride standing there with the knife in her hand as she prepared to cut the multi-storey cake. The men looked like boxers and were always laughing.

In any case, it wasn’t easy for her to get down the stair now. Perhaps it would have been better if she had never come to the Lowlands, but then it was her son who had taken her out, and
the house had been sold, and then he had got married and she was left alone. And it was pretty grim. Not that she idealised the Highlands either, don’t think that. People there would talk
behind your back and let you down in all sorts of ways, and you couldn’t tell what they were thinking half the time. Out here they left you alone, perhaps too much alone. So far she
hadn’t had any serious illness, which was lucky as she didn’t get on well with the neighbours who were young women of about thirty, all with platoons of children who looked like pieces
of dirt, with thumbs in their mouths.

Most days she sat at the wide window watching the street below her. Off to the right, she could see the main road down which the great red buses careered at such terrifying speed, rocking from
side to side. They would hardly stop for you. One of those days she would fall as she was boarding one. The conductors pressed the bell before you were hardly on, and the conductresses were even
worse, very impudent if you said anything to them.

Down below on the road she could see the children playing. She couldn’t say that she was very fond of children after what had happened with her son: leaving her like that after what she
had done for him. Not that some of the children weren’t nice. They would come to the door in their stiff staring masks at Hallowe’en, and she would give pennies to the politest amongst
them. They were much more forward than the children at home and they had no nervousness. They would stand there and sing their songs, take their pennies and run downstairs again. Late at night, in
summer, the boys and girls would be going past the houses singing and shouting; half drunk, she shouldn’t wonder. And their language. You could hear every word as plain as could be. And there
were no policemen where they were. Not that the housing scheme she was in was the worst. There was another one where none of the tenants could do anything to their gardens because the others would
tear them all up. You got some people these days!

Really, sometimes she thought that if she had enough money she would go back to the Highlands: but she didn’t have enough money, she had only the pension, and the fares were going up all
the time. In any event, she wouldn’t recognise the Highlands now. She had heard that the people had changed and were just as bad as the Lowlanders. You even had to lock the door now, an
unheard-of thing in the past. Why, in the past, you could go away anywhere you liked for weeks, leaving the door unlocked, and, when you came back, the house would be exactly as you had left it,
apart from the dust, of course.

It was hard just the same, being on your own all the time. All you got nowadays was closed curtains and the blue light of TV. It was just like a desert. Sitting there at the window all day was
not a life for anyone. But what could she do about it? She must put up with it. She had been the fool and now she must put up with it. No use crying.

So she rose late in the morning, for time was her enemy, and took in the milk and made the breakfast (she always had porridge) and then went down to the shop in the council house scheme, for
bread, meat and vegetables. In the adjacent newspaper shop she bought the
Daily Express
. When she had had her dinner she sat at the window until it was time for tea. After that she sat at
the window again unless it was a Wednesday or a Sunday for on these evenings she went to church. She used the light sparingly in order to save electricity, and sometimes she would walk about in the
dark; she was afraid that the lights would fuse and she would be unable to repair them. Her son had left her a small radio to which she listened now and again. What she listened to was the news and
the Gaelic programmes and the sermons. The sermons were becoming very strange nowadays: sometimes, instead of a sermon, they had inexplicable discussions about all sorts of abstruse things. Trying
to get down to the juvenile delinquents, that’s all they were doing. Another programme she sometimes listened to was called
The Silver Lining
. She only used the one station, the
Home: she never turned to the Light at all. She was frightened if she moved the hand that she would never get back to the Home again.

But the worst was the lack of visitors. Once or twice the Matron would come in, the minister now and again, and apart from that, no one except the rent man, the milkman and the electric man. But
the only thing the last three came for was money. No one ever came to talk to her as a human being. And so the days passed. Endlessly. But it was surprising how quickly they passed just the
same.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, on a fine summer’s day (that morning she had been to the Post Office to collect her pension as she always did on a Tuesday). She was sitting
by the window knitting: she had got into the habit of knitting many years ago and she couldn’t stop even though she had no one to knit for. The sideboard was full of socks – all
different colours of wool – and jerseys. Everyone said that she was good at knitting and that she should go in for prizes, but who wanted to do that? It was really a bright hot day, with the
sun reflected back in a glitter from the windows of the houses opposite. Most of them were open to let in the air, and you could see the curtains drifting a little and bulging.

Looking downwards like a raven from its perch, she saw him trudging from house to house. He was pressing the bell of the door opposite, his old case laid down beside him, dilapidated and brown,
with a strap across it. She saw him take a big red handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and wipe his face with it. The turban wound round his head, he stood at the door leaning a little against
the stone beside it, waiting. He seemed to have been carrying the case for ever, pressing doorbells and waiting, with an immense patience. The windows of the house opposite were open and she could
see Mrs whatever-her-name-was moving about in the living room, but she didn’t come to the door: probably she had seen him coming and didn’t want to let him in. After a while he turned
away.

As he did so he happened to glance up, and saw her sitting at the window. It was just pure chance that he saw her, but he would probably have come anyway since he would go to all the houses. On
the other hand, on such a hot day, he might not be willing to face the high stair. He bent down, picked up the case and crossed the road, a slim man. She was looking down directly on to the turban.
Strange people these, they had a religion of their own.

She listened for his foot on the stairs as she often listened for the step of the postman, who reached her house about eight o’clock in the morning when she was still lying in bed. Most of
the time he would have nothing but bills, and she would hear him ring the bell next door, and then his steps retreating down the stair again. Sometimes she would even get up and watch the letter
box with bated breath waiting for a letter to drop through on to the mat below.

In a similar manner, she waited this afternoon. Would he come up to the top or wouldn’t he? There was the sound of steps and then they faded. That must be someone going into the house on
the middle floor, perhaps the woman coming in from her shopping. Then silence descended again. It must have been another five minutes before the ring came at the door. She hurried along the
passageway trying to keep calm and when she opened the door on its chain, there he was, his dark face shining with sweat, his red bandana handkerchief in his hand. His case was laid down on the mat
outside the door.

‘Afternoon, missus,’ he said in a deep guttural voice. ‘Wish to see dresses?’ He seemed young though you couldn’t tell with them. He smiled at her; you
couldn’t tell about the smile either. It seemed warm enough; on the other hand, to him she was just business. She led him along the passageway to the living room which was at the far end of
the house, and he sat down in a deep armchair and began to open the case as soon as he had sat down. He gave the room a quick, appraising look, noting the polished side-board full of glasses of all
kinds, the copper-coloured carpet, the table in the centre with the paper flowers in the glass.